Papers

The WGBH Media Library and Archives is piloting an online media archive for scholarly research. In conversation with users, we have discovered they want to quickly pinpoint items relevant to their work and get an overview of collections and their relationships to other materials. To demonstrate the size and complexity of our collection to users in a meaningful way, WGBH is employing data visualization techniques to provide an interactive, graphical representation of the various relationships between items. This article discusses the techniques employed in implementing our relationship map, emphasizes the cataloging techniques required for this effort, and offers code and examples to spark discussion about ways to improve or extend this effort.

The WGBH Media Library and Archives is currently prototyping an online archive of moving image content. Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project seeks to serve scholars in their efforts to incorporate media into their research and communications activities.

We are currently prototyping a Fedora-backed online archive incorporating search, browse, data visualization, and web services. We will present the open source infrastructure behind our web project which includes Fedora, Solr and a PHP front end. Our Fedora content model addresses the specific needs of a moving image archive, allowing for the expression of complex relationships between conceptual and instantiated assets. In addition, it allows us to express the myriad permutations and oddities occurring within broadcast asset relationships.

We will share lessons learned and new challenges regarding the representation of archival moving image collections online, the unique cataloging and metadata needs of the online researcher, and barriers to the use of online archives by scholarly researchers. Finally, we will cover technical challenges involving storage and delivery of long form video content, rights management, and user authentication and sustainable business models.

This article describes the process and challenges of developing a content model that can support the content and metadata present in a complex media archive. Media archives have some of the most diverse requirements in an effort to catalog, preserve, and make accessible a wide range of content with multifaceted relationships between works. We focus particularly on the design and implementation of the WGBH Media Library and Archives’ Fedora digital access repository for scholars, educational users and the public. It is our hope that the process and findings from this work can support the architecture and development of other media archives.